As you know, felines come in truly terrifying sizes, such as tigers, which can reach 500-600 pounds. Canines, however, are comparatively disappointing, with the largest breeds reaching get perhaps 200 pounds (mastiffs can get heavier if they’re fat.)
This isn’t big enough. I’d like a 550 pound dog. Is there anything stopping us from selectively breeding dogs to get them to Siberia tiger size? Assume unlimited time and money and an insane desire for such an animal.
Dogs have tended to be social/pack animals and lack the incisors/claws of the solitary hunters. There aren’t big wild dogs because the successful wild dogs are endurance hunters.
With unlimited time evolution/selection could do it but with selection you’d run into inbreeding problems unless the program was big and used independent populations to keep out crossing.
You’d have more success with genetic engineering
Why are you comparing a single species (dogs) to an entire family (cats)? A like-for-like comparison would compare dogs (Canis lupis) to cats (Felis sylvestris), in which case the largest cats are only about 30 pounds.
Are you implying that there are members of the Canidae family that are larger than dogs?
Considering even Dire Wolves were below 200 lbs, not much help expanding it.
No, but the largest wild canines are pretty close to the largest dogs, and there also aren’t members of the Felidae that are smaller than the fennec fox. The natural variation in size within the two families isn’t all that different; the canines are just mostly smaller than the felines. What’s unusual is just that the single species Canis lupis can vary so much in size (with selective breeding)
On the other hand, the domestic cats are genetically more closely related to Pumas than Ocelots & Servals which domestic cats successfully breed with.
To answer the OP’s question, yes, I think you could breed such an animal. Look at all of the animals that humans have bred over the millennia. I’m not sure what you’d want to do with it (says the woman who finds her 150lb dog quite big enough), but you could do it.
I thought of one thing: you could hunt wild hogs with it. Those things get monstrously large and are a menace.
You might could breed one–and it would be as full of deleterious congenital defects as the current highly inbred, damaged freaks that thoughtless, selfish people continue to produce today.
I do not think you can.
Their history only supports a 200 pound animal at its natural largest.
Breeding for a little bigger is one thing, breeding for an animal more than twice it’s biggest ever it asking a miracle i think.
Think about it, the dogs structure is the result of millions of years work.
It does not just change overnight, and it reached a peak maximum a while ago.
Now, you want to double the weight, double or more the stress on the skeleton and joints?
You can not just make a bone bigger and say there, problem solved.
You have to redesign the entire skeleton to bear out these new stresses.
New hip structure, rework the knees, the neck vertebrae etc, new muscle attachment points, different mass, different cartilage, different bone density and composition and on and on.
We have not even discussed things like heart, lungs, nervous system, etc etc.
The castle you build of popsicle sticks, its a wonder on the scale of the popsiscle stick, but when that castle is scaled up and weighs 3M metric tons suddenly the wood planks and elmers glue dont cut it.
You can not simply make something bigger, it comes at a price.
The animal needs an appropriate amount of time for nature to gradually navigate through the required changes, and the required mental/social changes.
500 pound dogs need different teeth, and possibly modified paws.
Because they are going to become solitary animals.
Their eco system does not support a pack animal of 500+ pound appetite each.
So mister dog needs a new mentality to go with the body
And this is Mother Nature we are talking about doing this, she knows how to design shit and knows what she is doing for the most part.
This is a long term project for her at best.
Human beings? trying to play God in a box, overnight no less?
I think you would wind up with a horribly defective creature, with no place in the natural world (And yes i know that describes a lot of designer dogs to a T)
A dog very prone to self injury, tons of skeletal defects, short life with a painful end part.
And if that is the animal you wind up with in your tinkering, i myself do not call that successful.
And yes i realize that means i would not consider a lot of designer animals successful, because they aren’t, if you allowed nature to, she’d kill them.
I think you could do it by selectively breeding the tallest dog (great dane) with the heaviest dog (mastiff or st bernard). Keep breeding the biggest & tallest with the biggest and tallest and in a couple hundred years, you’ll have your 550lb dog. Pooper scooping would be a big job though :eek:
Zorba was the heaviest dog that had a verified weight at 343 pounds. A St. Bernard name Benedictine had an unverified weight of 366 pounds. Those were outliers, with enough effort perhaps a breed of that typical size could be developed and over time outliers might approach 500 pounds, but it could also be a horrific experiment resulting in suffering and early death for numerous dogs with nothing accomplished in the end.
I’ll note here that over a century of breeding thoroughbred horses has not led to faster race horses.
There was Epicyon that could get to be 300 lbs. Assuming you had one of those, it could probable be bred to be close to 500 lbs.
Cats are generally ambush hunters, adapted to short chases, so that’s probably why they can naturally sustain a larger size.
Estimate is 200 to 300 pounds, quite a bit of variance there between a 200 pound animal and a 300 pound one.
Personally i would throw out a guess of closer to the 200 pound mark.
Compared to the cat headed https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Epicyon_haydeni_skeleton.jpg, the Dire Wolf is the stronger animal, i am no expert at skeletal things but i am thinking faster to.
That’s about 4 to 5 million years of work between those two.
If you look at only 1 thing, look at the hip and pelvis.
Look how it is made, how it is put together, picture how it functions.
Now imagine it carrying double the weight and how ever much that increases the stresses.
Now, though similar sharing in some common ancestor back in the primordial past, you can see that mister siberian tiger made a lot of engineering changes to carry around and manuver that 600 pounds of attitude, while efficiently existing for a very long time.
He is more than just bigger.
They also do not tend to wander around in packs of up to 30 members.
30 tigers plus one kill = 30 hungry mad tigers.
So smaller is better when your family is kind of large
Lions live in packs, some quite large, and they can get to 500 lbs.
Average
African Lioness 280 pounds / Asiatic 300 pounds
African Lion 420 / Asiatic 500 pounds
Average size of pride 13, but could consist of up to 40
Asiatics have separate male / female prides (boring)
Lions also have a very limited area of existence.
There are only limited places on earth that support very well large pack predators, and the “food” in those places is usually large enough it requires a pack to kill it.
Lions are the only existing pack kitty.
(Hyena’s don’t count, they arent full on kitty, just a distant cousin 30 times removed)
So, you are agreeing with me?
On which?
Lions?
They are the exception for cats rather than the rule and there are only 2 unique locations on earth (presently anyways) that both support, and require this situation.
And if you go even farther back…
